


Notes On A Star Wars AU

by RoryKurago



Category: Pacific Rim (2013), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate universe - Jaeger Pilots, Drift Compatibility, Gen, Guatemalan Poe Dameron, Mark I Glory Days, Operation Pitfall (Pacific Rim), Originally Posted on Tumblr, peripheral C3P0 references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 19:26:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5940370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the AU where Leia Organa and her brother pilot a Mark-1 against a kaiju off a coastline where the nearest population centre is a tiny fishing village called Jakku. She doesn’t find a boy in the rubble but one finds her later, after she takes command of the Jaeger Academy. She doesn’t want another protégé, but this one comes in with a sunshine smile and determination that if they stop the kaiju, they'll stop the poisoned rain that's killing his country.<br/>This is the AU where Finn and Slip pilot Mark-3 GD-34, and when Slip's nerve fails he leaves bloody fingerprints across the front of a drivesuit helmet.<br/>This is the AU where Leia finds another protégé in remains of Jakku years later--but this one is waiting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notes On A Star Wars AU

**Author's Note:**

> I was planning to write this up into an actual story - or moreso - but time is against me, and I said I'd upload it for a friend to play with. SO.
> 
> This is TOTALLY open for writing/inspiration! (But please do link your works back to this one. Mostly because I'd just like the see the beauty of more PacRim/Star Wars.)

This is the AU where Leia Organa and her brother pilot a Mark-I against the biggest category-1 kaiju yet off a coastline where the nearest population centre is a tiny fishing village called Jakku. She doesn’t find a boy in the rubble, but one finds her later, after her brother goes AWOL to wrestle with his remorse at failure and Leia takes on leadership of the Jaeger Academy. This boy comes into the first batch of cadets she oversees with a sunshine smile and determination that if they stop the kaiju, they’ll stop the poison rain that’s killing his homeland.

She doesn’t want another protégé – she has her hands full with the son who insists that if his father can pilot, he can (at twelve) – but she’s charmed despite herself. She lets him charm her more when he shows her a photo of his parents together in the uniform of the early-days Corps. They’re not around anymore, but they did their job well: their son becomes the best pilot the Corps has ever had.

One of the Academy mechanical maintenance droids attaches itself to him within a month, and even Leia’s stern glance warning it out of her office when she calls Poe and his co-pilot Jessika Pava in to tell them they’re first in line for a Jaeger doesn’t scare it away. Its loyalty circuit might as well be hardwired now.

She doesn’t smile when, graduating, Poe adds the Organa crest to the bomber jackets he and Jessika get made up. (But she does.)

...

This is the AU where Han Solo and Chewbacca pilot the Mark-I Millennium Falcon, which looks like a piece of junk but still goes out every time, and the LOCCENT crew have a running pool on how many times a year they’ll get to hear:

“I love you.”

“I know.”

...

This is the AU where Finn and Slip co-pilot Mark-III GD-34 against Knifehead off a nuke-desolated coastline that harbours only a middle-of-nowhere fishing-and-salvage village called Jakku.

This is the AU where, when Slip’s nerve fails as it sometimes does, he leaves bloody fingermarks across the front of a drivesuit helmet and Finn pilots back to shore alone, too deep in a haze to be aware of LOCCENT trying to re-establish contact.

Finn leaves the Corps. 

 ...

This is the AU where Ben Organa is outraged his mother has taken a shine to a scruffy Guatemalan over his talented self, and redoubles his effort to do everything better, faster, more.

(How many times does someone pull them apart in the Kwoon outside sparring hours? More than his parents hear about.)

 ...

This is the AU where General Organa rallies her troops in the final days of a war they can’t win after the fall of the golden boys of GD-34, despite the fact that her last pilots are a handful that includes her last protégé, her husband, and his best friend. The Republic’s faith begins to fail in the face of growing global unrest and they start withdrawing their support of the Defence Corps. The kaiju keep getting bigger and, if the odds Leia’s best mathematician spits out are correct, it’s going to get much worse before the end.

Leia goes on tour to pull the last strings she has and gather up her assets to make a personal contribution to the effort. If that’s all that keeps them going, so be it.

Cutting a deal with Maz Kanata, empress of the South-East Asian underground, is not a means she’d have accepted at the beginning of the War but options are getting thin on the ground. And Maz knows _so_ many people.

...

This is the AU where Leia makes a stop in a tiny village on a dusty coast during her tour. It didn’t look like this the last time she was here.

Leia is (intimately) aware of how much devastation the early nuclear attacks wrought on the land. This is part of why she fought so hard to have the Jaeger Program implemented. But she’s never seen anywhere so reduced to rubble and ruin as Jakku.

In the salvage station that processes bits of helicopter, oil tanker and container ship that wash up, she finds another scrapper. This one – “Rey”, this one’s name is Rey – is waiting.

North of here there used to be a port for surveillance vessels, before the world knew what the Breach was or how bad the horror leaking out of it would become. The girl has been scraping a living for ten years now, but she _burns_. Leia can see that. She doesn’t burn as hot as Ben but she’s steady, she's fierce.

Leia knows what Rey does not, which is that the surveillance ship Rey’s parents were on – long before the media got free run on everything to do with the Breach – was sunk shortly after the Breach event that turned Jakku into sand flats and wasteland. Rey knew what her parents did; barely remembers them but knows they would have been on that ship. Still she holds a shred of hope that they never made it aboard, or that they got clear and are recovering somewhere. Trying to come back for her.

She says it, even while Leia sits opposite her on a milk-crate stool in the hideaway Rey has cleared for herself in a half-collapsed building.

Leia holds her while she cries.

And when Rey is done, Leia takes her back to Hong Kong and starts to train her.

...

This is the AU where Poe Dameron witnesses Rey stepping off a helicopter into a gust of icy rain and immediately strips off his jacket. She’s red-eyed from the flight and so tired she’s barely upright but she smiles, tugging the lapels a little closer around her throat.

He cheerfully steps out of his place as the General’s favourite pilot—but it’s not without a trade-off. In exchange for his performance and demeanour, he’s promised the Mark-V XW-01. Jessika is thrilled. Ben Organa less so.

...

This is the AU where Ben Organa, nineteen years old and the _second_ best pilot in the Corps, is cheated of what he thinks he deserves and defects to the private sector. Given his training, bloodline, and insider knowledge, he shoots straight to the attention of a CEO whose company makes a fortune off the blood shed in consolidating territories beyond the long arm of the Pacific-centred Republic.

 ...

Rey speaks binary. It’s no surprise to anyone when she’s the one to figure out the bugs in the salvaged GD-34’s memory and bring her back online. To reconstruct the severely corrupted recording of the final Drift of GD-34’s pilots.

Rey knew the basics; even in Jakku, they got the big news. But she’s never seen anything like this from inside a pilot’s helmet. She doesn’t sleep much that night.

With GD’s OS restored, Rey convinces General Organa that refitting the least damaged, most upgrade-compatible Jaeger is a better option than trying to resurrect any of the newer but far more damaged Mark-IVs that are dropping like flies with every Breach.

Leia reminds her that the Mark-IIIs had a lot of bugs: not as reliable as the Mark-Is, not as quick or sophisticated as the Mark-IVs.

Rey just grins. It’s a good thing they’ve got the best pilot in the Corps then, isn’t it? Failing everything else, Leia can put Rey and someone into XW-01, and Poe and Jessika into GD-34.

“Or,” offers Poe, “me and you into GD-34.”

Rey does not blush, because Poe is an accomplished flirt who is simultaneously appallingly erotic even when he’s saying “this coffee tastes like sewage” and an oblivious sunshine puppy.  
(But she does a bit.)

...

This is the AU where Poe and Rey have a thrice-weekly assignation in the Kwoon to spar, but the only kissing that happens is Poe kissing Rey's hand when she perfectly executes his signature move. Because, in his own words, he wants her to be able to focus on becoming a Ranger. If that’s what she wants.

(This is also the AU where there’s a betting pool on whether or not Poe and Rey are sleeping together, because Poe and everybody else is. But still: the only kissing that happens is Poe kissing Rey’s hand when she executes his moves, and Rey kissing Poe’s cheek when he says he wants her to be a Ranger.)

...

This is the AU where Leia sits down with Poe, Rey, and Jessika after the Republic cuts off their last support, and says she has an idea.  
Jessika joins Rey in the Kwoon. Poe gets onto a helicopter with General Organa.

 ...

Finn’s been gone five years when General Organa, Poe Dameron and an orange-and-white soccer ball get out of a helicopter next to the section of Wall Finn’s working.

Not a soccer ball: a Jaeger maintenance droid.

“I’m done with it, General,” Finn says. “We can’t fight them. They’re too big, too strong.”

General Organa, far less voluble than when she was young, smiles and lets her secret weapon do the talking. While she goes to talk the foreman into paying out Finn’s severance package, Poe follows Finn to the foot of a decayed pipeline with the droid at his heels.

When Poe’s done talking, he tucks his hands into the pockets of his parka and studies Finn closely. “You’re worth more than this, Finn,” he says at last, and Finn flinches because nobody’s called him that since they told him Slip was gone and the screaming Finn heard was only in his head. He doesn’t have a name anymore. He’s the number on his ration book.

“They treat you like bags of cement out here," says Poe, "like you’re only worth what you contribute to the Wall. Don’t you want your humanity back?”

Finn’s chewing on that when the droid rolls forward. It chirrups a sequence of quizzical beeps and pings.

Finn looks down at it. “I don’t speak bot.”

Poe smiles and it’s like the clouds opening; have Finn’s ribs always felt this small?

“BB-8 asked where you’d rather die: here, or in a Jaeger?”

 

 ...

This is the AU where Finn steps off a helicopter into sporadic rain followed by Poe, who immediately crosses the deck to a young woman in a beaten-up leather jacket holding several umbrellas. As Poe takes one for the General, he and the young woman exchange words in Spanish.

“ _Veo que has guardado seguro mi chaleco_ –”

Finn never learned another language than English; at least, he remembers snatches of something in a voice that might be his parent’s, but he doesn’t know what to call it. Everything they say sounds alien.

Poe turns away to open the umbrella over the General, and the young woman holds another out to Finn. She has the clearest eyes Finn has ever seen.

“You’re a Mark-III pilot?” she says. “I’ve never met one of those before. The Mark-IIIs are pretty tough to handle.”

...

This is the AU where Leia leads Finn into a mostly empty hangar that’s harrowing in its vacancy, looking a dozen years older than when he saw her five years back. “We’ve never been an army, Finn. We’re the resistance.”

 ...

Poe and Rey both trail him to the bay where GD-34 is having her final touches put in place. Both offer commentary on her refit, upgrades, new specs. There’s a little good-natured squabbling—just enough to make him wonder if…

But they’re both looking at the Jaeger. His Jaeger. Sparks fly off welders at her joints like plasma blasts, and her nuclear port is lensed shut but it’s something just to know that her heart beats again. Finn leans on a railing, trying to make it look casual and not like his knees are threatening to give out. Poe takes up a position on one side of him, Rey the other.

“One of a kind,” Finn says.

“One of a kind,” Rey agrees, and her eyes reflect fire.

 

...

This is the AU where Finn cuts a fine figure facing off against Poe Dameron, the best pilot in the Corps, and comes off an even tally. But when the crowd clears, Rey remains, leaning on her bo to watch and wait for her own sparring session with Jessika and Poe (scheduled to begin shortly).

It’s not the red string of fate or anything like that that makes Finn ask if she’s a pilot herself. It’s just curiosity, the way she holds her staff, and maybe the way her eyes lit up when she said she’d never met a Mark-III pilot before. (The present tense when she talks about GD-34.)

General Organa hasn’t left the room before Finn’s on his back.

Poe stands off the mat shoulder-to-shoulder with Jessika and glances back at the General. Checking she’s watching. Or checking to see he doesn’t have to completely rehash everything that’s about to go down in her office later.

Grinning, Rey offers Finn her hand.

 ...

This is the AU where Ben Organa - Kylo Ren - attempts at the behest of Chairman Snoke to control a captured kaiju by Drifting with it. The intent is to use it as a weapon of intimidation and total war against the next territory the Order wants to annex. A terrestrial asset contract; an attack dog.

His father, extremely ticked off to be in Russia shooting his way into a corporate lab instead of down the coast piloting his Jaeger where he belongs, slaps the Pons shutdown button while Chewie deals with the last of the guards.

Also, Han’s going to have to sedate ‘Kylo’ to get him onto the chopper home, and Han has very strong feelings about needles and sedating.

Also, it’s fucking freezing this far north and Han's freezing off bits of himself he’d rather Leia than a medic get up-close with. Chewie’s got long enough hair that at least his ears aren’t freezing off, but Han’s are and his parka is _not_ thick enough.

Kylo’s quick to come around, but bleary. “You,” he accuses, “are interrupting a ground-breaking scientific experiment.” He bends over to throw up.

Han sidesteps, holds his son’s hair back. Kid needs a haircut. But first:

“Ground-breaking sci—how the hell did you expect to control that thing?”

“I,” Ben slurs indignantly, “was going to use the Drift.”

“THAT'S NOT HOW THE DRIFT WORKS.”

 ...

This may or may not be the AU where Han gets over his thing about needles and drags his delinquent son home to Leia to get the ear-lashing of several lifetimes.

Regardless, the Corps’ reaction comes too late to stop the kaiju processing all the intel they got from Ben’s Drift and turning it against it them.

 ...

This is the AU where Han and Chewie pilot the Falcon into Victoria Harbour to save thousands of people from the backlash of Ben’s pique, and Leia sits down beside a screen in LOCCENT for a good minute before she orders the ensigns to reset the clock and send the choppers for GD-34.

 ...

This is the AU where Finn walks into Challenger Deep side-by-side with Rey while Poe and Jessika run a bomb big enough to take the Breach, them and everything within a mile out with them.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Captain Phasma is a Fightmaster at the Academy, probably.


End file.
